At our recent Executive Forum in London, LEF researchers and prominent guest speakers – including the author, Clay Shirky; Unilever CIO, Willem Eelman; and Salesforce.com Chief Scientist, J.P. Rangaswami – said a great many important things about the future of Enterprise IT. Technology is clearly moving to the front of the firm, with mobility, social media, business intelligence, and increasingly empowered workforces creating all manner of new challenges and opportunities. While many cost and legacy pressures remain, it's a great time for our profession.

But as we think back on what was a very successful event, some of the most powerful messages were the things that our clients told us, via our audience polling system. Consider the following three data points, drawn from the roughly 60 CIOs and other senior IT attendees:

IT leaders don't use social media. More than three-quarters of the audience admits that they rarely (57%) or occasionally (20%) use Facebook, with the use of Twitter even less. While not entirely surprising, it is ironic that Clay Shirky's speech on the power of social media was a clear highlight of the day, and that our clients consistently tell us that social media is a top business priority. The result is a decidedly mixed message – "Yes, social media is critical, but no, I don't really use it myself." While IT professionals are hardly alone in experiencing this particular form of cognitive dissonance, we think it says a lot about the growing tensions between Enterprise IT and our increasingly consumerized future.

The majority of IT leaders think we will avoid a double-dip recession. From a research point of view, the timing of our conference (September 8) couldn't have been much better in terms of gauging the economic/business climate within our client base. Given all the recent economic bad news on both sides of the Atlantic, clients were relatively sanguine. While 40% think a double-dip recession is likely (11% highly likely, 29% likely), 60% think it will be avoided. Perhaps more tellingly, a large majority of our clients believe that their own firm's business is getting stronger, suggesting a possible gap between today's headlines and actual business conditions. We can only hope so.

Enterprise IT has mixed views regarding HP's possible exit from the PC business. While this idea has been mostly pilloried in the press as a form of corporate suicide, our clients have a much more mixed reaction, with a very slight majority seeing a spin-off as a good move. Although it remains to be seen if new CEO, Meg Whitman, will continue down this path, that this idea is even being seriously considered is clear evidence of today's increasingly Post-PC era, and the repositioning it will require. Netflix's recent decision to separate its video streaming and DVD mailing businesses (the latter now blandly named Qwickster) reflects a similar bet on a rapidly changing technological landscape.

These three findings strongly reinforce the three main themes of our conference:

• The global economy is being Virtualized, with software increasingly replacing physical things and facilities. This means that the IT industry can continue to grow and prosper even in recessionary times.
• The IT industry is being Consumerized, with mass markets becoming more influential than corporate computing. This means that Enterprise IT will have to work hard to keep up with mainstream IT marketplace trends.
• The Enterprise IT function is being Repositioned toward the front of the firm, with back-office facilities becoming increasingly commoditized. This means that ambitious IT organizations must move beyond the traditional back-office mindset and emerge as true business leaders.

The implications of this VCR pattern of economic, technological and Enterprise IT change will shape our research in 2012 and beyond. Virtualization will continue to drive all manner of business and economic innovation, while the impact of Consumerization will often be primarily cultural in nature. For many of our clients, successfully Repositioning IT to take advantage of the ongoing developments in both of these areas will be the most important organizational challenge of the next few years. That's why it is now the main focus of our Business/IT Relationship Management research.